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Newt and Marianne and Ted and Alice

January 24, 2012 4:11 pmJanuary 24, 2012 4:11 pm

Since I’m cited repeatedly as the tribune of an unforgiving moral absolutism in Timothy Noah’s piece kinda-sorta defending Newt Gingrich’s request that his second wife tolerate his ongoing affair, it would be unsporting of me not to find something in his brief to dispute. So I’ll take on this point:

If all three parties agree to [an open marriage], what business is it of anyone else’s? From a utilitarian point of view, this is hard to argue with, and during the 1970s a lot of people argued for it. So why are even cosmopolitan people now appalled? Certainly the sexual utopianism of the 1970s was extremely naive about most people’s emotional sensitivity to sexual infidelity. Open marriage sounded great in theory but in practice it wrought terrible damage on the married parties, their families, and even conceivably on their friends. Like a lot of cultural changes contemplated in the 1970s, it was too good to be true. But that isn’t really a moral argument against open marriage so much as a psychological one.

But surely from a utilitarian point of view, such psychological arguments are moral arguments. After all, if what you’re concerned about is minimizing harm and maximizing utility, then the fact that attempts at open marriage tend to inflict “terrible damage on the married parties, their families” and potentially their friends as well seems like a pretty strong moral case against the practice. In order to make a utilitarian argument in defense of Gingrich’s behavior, you need to argue that nobody is harmed (or that the expected happiness exceeds the expected harm) when consenting adults arrange their private lives as they see fit — and, indeed, many critics of monogamous norms make exactly this kind of argument. But not Noah: He’s acknowledging (and good for him!) that this consenting adults paradigm is fatally flawed — hopelessly narrow in its definition of “harm,” unmoored from the lived realities of human families, and blind to the inevitable ripple effects of supposedly private sexual decisions. But that acknowledgement is itself a form of moral judgment on what Gingrich did: Consequentialist and ends-based, to be sure, but no less a judgment for all that.

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Ross Douthat joined The New York Times as an Op-Ed columnist in April 2009. Previously, he was a senior editor at the Atlantic and a blogger for theatlantic.com. He is the author of "Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class" (Hyperion, 2005) and the co-author, with Reihan Salam, of "Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream" (Doubleday, 2008). He is the film critic for National Review.